In This Feature

Radiohead

October 15, 2007

by
findingDulcinea Staff

The ubiquitous, rebellious British band ups the ante in the record industry and continues to make timeless rock albums.

They’ve just released their first studio album in four years and given it a fill-in-the-blank price tag. But who are they and what’s the meaning of all this hype? The following is both an introduction to novices and a selection of Web fodder for die-hard Radiohead fans.

If you’re seeking more information on the economic side of Radiohead’s new release, read our story in Beyond the Headlines.

Radiohead was formed in Oxfordshire, England in 1986. The band’s name was taken from the title of a song on theTalking Headsalbum True Stories. Finding early success with the song “Creep,” which became a hit first in Israel, then in the U.S., this pioneering guitar band found international recognition when it produced The Bends (1995) followed by OK Computer (1997)—two of the most highly regarded alternative rock albums of all time.

Hailed by some critics as “bigger than the Beatles,” and by many others as simply peerless, Radiohead is one of few bands to span a two-decade career, release albums to critical and commercial success in both the U.S. and U.K., retain all of its original members and and maintain a reverential—even worshipful—fan base.

Radiohead carved out a niche that no other band has yet joined. Inspired by the music of bands like Pink Floyd, the roiling, anthemic early work of U2, and the post-punk offerings of groups like the Talking Heads and Pixies, the band’s early work depicted a bleak, thoughtful, profoundly moving perspective on politics, love, isolation and social issues. Poised at the nexus of Margaret Thatcher’s final years and the U.K.’s transition to a Labour government, Radiohead defined a disillusionment and self-awareness that was accompanied by complex, guitar-based arrangements, classically inspired innovations led by guitarist Jonny Greenwood, and singer Thom Yorke’s instantly recognizable falsetto.

The band may have, in effect, given away their CD, but we’ve still found it necessary to trawl the Internet for the most ethically sound access to their music. MTV, though it may have departed from its music-video-obsessed roots, has a great collection of Radiohead videos on its site. The selection spans their recording history, from the symphonic “Paranoid Android” (a big hit from OK Computer) to The Bends’ quietly moving "Fake Plastic Trees."

One Way magazine, an online source of new music and criticism, reviewed Radiohead’s middle-period “protest album,” Hail to the Thief (2003), revealing some key qualities of the band’s vision and platform. The oeuvre may be timeless, but each of Radiohead’s releases is highly contextualized, driven by such globe-encompassing events as the war in Iraq and the repercussions of life in a highly digital world. As Steve Mellano notes in One Way, Hail to the Thief marked the band’s first musical reaction to 9/11, but instead of mourning, the band “looked deeper, to the geopolitical shifts that are bringing about an increasingly uncertain world.” While this meant a “sense of foreboding” and a controversial title referring to President Bush’s election victory in Florida, the album’s meaning “goes beyond the obvious, to the general malaise or darkness that they feel is enveloping mankind.” This album stands as a manifesto of the band’s intellectual vision.

The All Music Guide, or AMG, is an encyclopedic reference tool for modern music. AMG launches its biography of Radiohead with the assertion that they were “one of the few alternative bands of the early '90s to draw heavily from the grandiose arena rock that characterized U2's early albums.” Many fans and critics agree that both bands, both formed over twenty years ago, continue to create high-quality repertory foreshadowed by their earliest work.

AMG narrates Radiohead’s story through the band’s seven full-length releases, but also answers questions: Who’s in the band? Who plays which instrument? What bands are considered Radiohead’s forebears?

Click on the album names within this biography to read All Music’s critical reviews of the albums.

For new listeners, whose ears perked up at Radiohead’s aversion to “The Industry” but who knew nothing about the music until now, AMG provides a list of “moods” commonly associated with Radiohead’s sound: “insular,” “epic,” “sprawling,” “wistful” and “eerie” are five apt descriptors.

Metacritic’s gathering of reviews from around the Web makes it a valuable place to compare perspectives on some of Radiohead’s albums. The page for the album Kid A features more than a dozen snippets of critical reviews with percentage grades, as well as links to the articles’ original locations.

Thanks to the Internet, rock royalty can join us in our study, office or living room; Radiohead has a blog. Hosted on their homepage Radiohead.com, “Dead Air Space” features frequent update from Yorke, the Greenwoods and (less frequently) other members of the band. These down-to-earth missives are revealing and poignant, and often include artwork and suggested sites, books or music to check out.

For the connoisseur or aspiring expert, the band also hosts its old material on the Web site, including multimedia projects created during the recording of OK Computer in 1996. That material can be accessed here.

For those who have memorized every nuance of OK Computer, or want to know what’s so great about it (you’re exactly ten years late to this party), look no further than acclaimed music blog Stereogum, which, to honor OKC’s tenth anniversary, commissioned some of its favorite bands to record covers of Radiohead songs and provide notes on how they came to reinterpret their forebears’ pieces. Each song can be streamed on Stereogum’s site accompanied by the bands’ brief narratives.

The Guardian has always loved music;the newspaper’s coverage of Radiohead is proof. The Radiohead slide show now available on their site takes us chronologically from the band’s late-80s obsession with sunglasses to the unfolding dynamic between Yorke and Jonny Greenwood. Each photo features a generous caption that guides us through the band’s history, mentioning some facts you won’t find elsewhere.

This is an era in which musical tastes change as quickly as cell phone technology. We are constantly approaching long-standing musical acts with the question: Does this music still matter? Although bands often adapt their musical platforms to changing tastes, the question speaks to the quality of the music and the ambition of the group: Is the group “staying true”? Do the new truths sound great? Are they convincing, or do they fall flat?

Decades-old acts tend to stick around, like U2, or fade quietly, like REM; Radiohead is in the first category. There have certainly been spells of acclaimed but less compelling releases from Radiohead, but the music has rarely suggested creative drought or intra-band struggle. As Alex Pedritis notes in the Guardian, In Rainbows “does not sound like a band clutching their brows and wondering what to do next,” though the album’s arduous recording process, which straddled the 2006 release of Thom Yorke’s solo album, The Eraser, hinted that the band was on the verge of a breakup. Not so.

Why has the band endured? Radiohead has a striking ability to match younger players with a continual supply of variegated, brooding, and, above all, timeless work. But how much will Radiohead’s loyal fans pay for the new work? As the Australian newspaper The Age speculated, “To their fans, eagerly awaiting their first studio album for four years, it is near priceless. Those who believe Radiohead long ago descended into self-indulgence may only risk pennies."

What do the fans think of the album? Wired magazine’s blog has a section called “Listening Post,” where you can hear a sample of each one of In Rainbows’ tracks and rate it using Reddit.com’s up-arrow (like it) or down-arrow (hate it) hierarchical system. While Wired’s actual review only skims the surface of this album’s significance, this neat tool is a great way to see what listeners deem the most superior tracks.

Alex Pedritis, who is the Guardian’s pop and rock critic, reasserted Radiohead’s preeminence in their home country by giving In Rainbows five stars. More important, he championed the band’s casual marketing campaign. By turning a music retailer’s checkout into a collection box where fans pay whatever they want for an MP3 or physical copy of the album, Radiohead tackled the players on either side of the music-industry fence. And as Pedritis observed, “The honesty-box approach meant In Rainbows was discussed in areas not usually noted for their interest in leftfield gloom-rock.”